Project Folders (sub-teams)

Jumping in here to express my dire need for this feature as well :slight_smile:

If there was one thing I could ask of Asana to make the system more efficient it would be this feature and nothing else. My left pane is completely unmanageable which almost defeats the purpose of using a task management system?

Please … :pray:

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I serve 3 different clients who EACH and ALL have expressed this as a “weakness” of Asana. They want Folders on the left side that contain related projects to create a simplified view in that pane.

Each of these teams use Asana to create a “project” for each staff meeting agenda. Most tasks in the agenda project are tasks that exist in the upcoming event. (for example, in the week 16 team agenda, they might discuss and decide the emcee for a fundraising dinner…that task is actually in the Fundraising Dinner project (from a template). They want a a quarter’s worth of upcoming staff meeting agenda projects created, waiting and linked to the tasks from multiple events in process. In my teams’ case, the folders would be: ‘Event Templates’ ‘2018 Events’ ‘2017 Events’ (the events from years previous to 2017 would be archived, so no need for folders there) ‘TeamA Meeting Agendas’ ‘TeamB Meeting Agendas’

Pretty please can I talk (toss thoughts) with a developer about this?

Hello Guys,

Same here !
As a web agency, we create a team for each of our clients and use projects to organize our projects workflow (examples of projects : essentials / steps / user stories / current sprints etc…).
The issue is that we can have several projects in the same time for the same client. As we need different Asana’s project for each of our project we end to have a long list of projects for each client, completely unorganized. So It will be great to great folders/stack for each of our projects combining all the related asana projects.

Cheers

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ASSana hasn’t changed in years. We are speaking to ourselves here.

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I badly need this feature as well. We have a number of clients, and the number of projects we have for each is increasing by the day. My left pane is getting out of hand! It would be a lot organized for project managers to have different folders to dump in similar projects.

Our software development team is joining the crowd in need of project grouping/organizing!

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I strongly agree with the need for better options/controls for organizing projects in Asana. Not much more needs to be said on that argument, but here are a few thoughts on the primary “workaround” — Create additional teams for project “scopes” — suggested a few times throughout this thread and its shortcomings based on our experience.

Our Digital Team (department) has experimented with this approach — partly because simply mirroring our org’s departments in Asana feels too generalized, and doesn’t accurately represent the cross-dept nature of their workflows that are the best fits for Asana in the first place. Here’s what we’re trying…

Our Digital Department’s Asana “teams”:
  • Digital Team - departmental equivalent, private to members, houses private 1:1 & team goal/planning projects.
  • Digital Team Projects - for projects owned/managed by Digital Team members, but Asana “team members” herein include common contributors/stakeholders of our department’s initiative, to ensure they have project-level visibility by default.
  • Email Projects - similar purpose to the above, just specifically for email marketing-related projects (because we have a TON!). Again the regular contributors & stakeholders from other departments are team “members” to have default access to underlying projects.
  • Email Backlogs - created for use by specific team members to manage a narrow scope of projects that follow a specific project management structure/workflow (GTD, product backlogs).


Perceived benefits Reality
Keeps the project list manageable Not all users navigate Asana equally, search bar vs. sidebar,
plus Asana auto-hides anything beyond the top 5 projects/team
Provides “natural” organization Requires more buy-in & adoption (learning curve for outside contributors)
Aids permission management Actually complicates it further (member “groups” would be the real solution here!)
Emulates “folder” logic Requires additional naming conventions/adoption

All that having been said, could this approach work for some orgs better than ours — absolutely. But I think it presents enough additional challenges (both in ease of adoption and limitations of other aspects of the app) that would be naturally avoided through the ability to tag and group projects together — whether that's visually represented through folders or not. Those are such common features of nearly all other apps and UIs that the learning curve would be null.

One thing I love about Asana is its openness in terms of the freedom orgs have to structure projects to match their own workflows and styles. But this is also probably its biggest weakness. Without enough rigidity in the tool’s structure, it doesn’t help teams adopt better conventions naturally. Too much freedom and the lack of (in this case) the standard “tools” we’ve come to expect in a project management app can hinder teams from expanding their adoption and optimizing their practices. Ultimately, that hurts Asana’s viability as a solution.

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I think Wrike has a patent on their folder system, so I imagine Asana couldn’t replicate this if they wanted to.

HI highly doubt anyone can patent a folder hierarchy. In fact its just a collapsible menu. Wrike would be suing Apple, Microsoft and many others for sure :).

We build menus like this in websites all the time :). Its easy to do, and woudl be easy for Asana to implement.

I use firefox’s left bar bookmark to workaround.

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Oh thats interesting and original! But I dont think good for teams of people, but very good for individuals. I am tempted to see if I can write a Tampermonkey script, so if my projects were named Clients->Client1 for example, I am sure some simple Javascript in Tampermonkey could combined them all into a parent child hierarchy. Wish I didn’t have to of course as its such a no brainer feature! If anyone doesn’t ant it they dont have to use it so its not a big change for Asana.

I am in the middle of struggling to decide if a large project I am working on should use Sections for different sub-projects or I create a separate Workspace for it so I can have multiple projects, but I really dont want a separate team or workspace adding to sidebar clutter.

I should not have to have these dilemmas which are actually delaying projects progressing because I cant think how to set it up in a limited project management system!

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Yes indeed, it is for individual use.

If you want something with hierarchy, try quire.io.
It’s similar to Asana. Although it’s not as sophisticated, it has unlimited hierarchy with nice outline format.

I’m actually very surprised this feature is not available in Asana. Yes, this feature is needed to organize projects.

I would like to see the ability to link a folder (or multiple folders, or a folder of folders) to an Asana project (or even a task) and not just individual files. Likewise, it would also be beneficial to attach Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive, etc. folders to the project.

Regarding tasks/attachments that have been emailed to the project, perhaps Asana would create a folder within that folder called “Asana Attachments” and then those files could be organized into appropriate locations after the fact.

Also regarding email attachments, many times emails will have company logos and other image files in the headers/footers/signatures. Those end up becoming files in Asana and there is no need for this. Asana should either 1) strip that out of the email, 2) display the image within the task’s body just like it appears in the email, or 3) allow the team to delete those attachments from the files list.

Please, please, please! Projects are getting out of hand, but it doesn’t make sense to create a brand new team for each project.

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Adding my +1 here (even though it appears to be falling on deaf ears). I appreciate that you need to consider simplicity when you’re designing any product but damn everyone’s used a folder hierarchy, get it done.

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my 2 cents: this is a basic future that everybody needs. A CEO has to see all departments projects, and then have your own, and this makes it difficult and time consuming to navigate through all of them to find the one you need.

Here is a work around that I use till this future appears:

It is a modification/improvement on @Carlo 's suggestion in this post.

Create a project that acts as directory, use sort by custom fields (they act as a folder tree, like notebook stacks in evernote ) that you can collapse or expand, and then have comments as projects that you can click on to go to that project.
You can use subtasks to

make it with more levels if you need that.

@Marie - I think this should be combined with the thread called “Master Projects with Sub-Projects”. Between the two, there are 131 votes and 73 individual comments.

Further, do you have any feedback on this popular feature request? Thanks.